Hours before Aaron Nola flirted with a no-hitter, a kid from CB West was perfect, in all the best ways

By the time Aaron Nola started tearing through the Detroit Tigers’ lineup Monday night, a few seniors on the Central Bucks West High baseball team were yukking it up over hoagies and chips at a chain deli in Doylestown. None of them watched in real time as Nola carried a no-hitter into the seventh inning, striking out 12 in an 8-3 Phillies victory at Citizens Bank Park. Their smartphones did buzz and flash with updates as they ate their sandwiches, but that was all. That was expected. That’s how teenage baseball players follow sports these days. Besides, they’d already seen what was, as far as they were concerned, the day’s best pitching performance, something even better than a major-league no-hitter.

One of them was even responsible for it.

Julio Ermigiotti was 5-foot-4 and scrawny two years ago, when he was a sophomore at CB West. So like any high school athlete who aspires to have a spot on the varsity team, he hit the weights. He got himself strong enough that Brian Weaver, the Bucks’ head coach, called him up from the JV team that season. In one game, Pennridge hammered West’s starting pitcher, who lasted just two innings. Weaver sent Ermigiotti to the mound. In his varsity debut, Ermigiotti threw five shutout innings.

“We were like, ‘Oh,’” Weaver said.

The CB West baseball program hasn’t had many Oh moments. “It’s always kind of been invisible,” said Weaver, who has coached the team for five years and taught history at West for 16. The school had a powerhouse football team from the late 1960s through the late 1990s, arguably the best in Pennsylvania. Its girls’ basketball and soccer programs have traditionally been strong. Its baseball team hasn’t. Nothing terrible, but nothing outstanding. Not until last month, really.

Last month was when the PIAA District 1 Class 6A tournament began. Ermigiotti, by now a senior, had established himself as one of West’s best pitchers. Now 5-foot-8, with the kind of thick-legged lower body that allows a pitcher to surge off the mound and generate velocity, he hasn’t lost a game this season, has a fastball that touches 89 mph, and averages 1.5 strikeouts an inning. He’s heading to Lehigh University this fall, to pitch for the Mountain Hawks and study computer science.

“It’s all work ethic,” Weaver said. “Nothing was given to him. When he started, we would say that, pound for pound, he’s the toughest, most fundamentally sound player in the program. He’s just a tremendous human being. I have a son who’ll be 5, and if he grows up to be like Julio, I’m going to be a pretty proud dad.”

With a 13-6 record, CB West qualified for districts, which was notable in and of itself, given the program’s modest past. The Bucks had never won a district championship or taken part in the state playoffs. And even this minor achievement seemed bittersweet, because after a strong start, they had gone through a rough midseason stretch that damaged their seeding. They entered the tournament as the No. 14 seed out of 24 teams.

And won it.

Which meant that on Monday afternoon, at Villanova Ballpark in Plymouth Meeting, against Reading area’s Wilson West Lawn High School, Ermigiotti would start the first state playoff game in CB West history.

He thought it would be a good day once he retired the first three hitters lickety-split. “I was dialed in from the get-go,” Ermigiotti said. But it wasn’t until after CB West scored three runs in the bottom of the fourth inning that he noticed that no Wilson batter had reached base. And it wasn’t until after he had another 1-2-3 inning in the top of the fifth that his stomach started to swirl with nervousness. And it wasn’t until there were two outs in the top of the seventh, until he had struck out nine and was one out from a 3-0 victory and a perfect game, that he started talking to himself.

All right. Here we go. Got to get this done.

His 80th and final pitch was Wilson’s hardest-hit ball of the game, a slicing line drive beyond the infield. It happened to descend right where Will Hogenauer, West’s right fielder, was standing. The ball landed in Hogenauer’s glove, and there was a party on the pitcher’s mound, a used-to-be scrawny sophomore in the middle of it.

These have been a nasty couple of years in the Central Bucks School District. I know. My family and I live there. Fights about school closures. Fights about school curricula. Fights about book-banning and parents’ rights. School board meetings that devolve into screaming matches. National attention for all the wrong reasons. It’s hard sometimes to hear anything above that din, to trust that your civic leaders and public officials and private citizens are operating in good faith and with the best intentions.

Lately, though, around CB West at least, something has been a little different. A little better.

“It’s been really cool,” Weaver said. “At the end of the year, usually everybody, kids and adults, has their batteries on low and blinking. Instead, the last two weeks or so, people have been really excited to find me or find the players in the hallway and be like, ‘Hey, this is great!’ Teachers who have never seen us practice or play make a point of coming by to say, ‘This is so great for the school.’ High school sports are special that way.”

At their best, they can be, yes. Could be at CB West, or CB East, or CB South. Could be at Father Judge, which is scheduled to be West’s opponent Thursday in the state quarterfinals. Could be anywhere in the Philadelphia area, or anywhere at all. When everything feels big — every political argument, every election, every social-media dustup, every Phillies game, every Sixers second-round loss — it’s easy to forget or ignore the value in the small: A kid pitches a perfect game and celebrates with his friends and makes a memory or two that he’ll have forever.

If you think that stuff doesn’t matter, you’re wrong. There isn’t much, if anything, that matters more.